Re: New programming language - Extention

On 3 May 2008, at 10:59 am, Josh Goldstein wrote:
> I was actually wondering if you could do some type of AI program in  
> Prolog.
> One that would act sort of like the computer in Star Trek.

> You could ask it questions and it would answer based on info you had  
> told it before.
> I imagine it would store relations like isSynonym(run, jog) and  
> likesTo(jog, josh)
> and you could ask it if josh likes o run and it would say yes.
> Is this feasible?
> I'm guessing there must be some huge problem or someone would have  
> done it already.

Prolog was *invented* for natural language processing.
The METEO system (translating weather reports between English and  
French)
was the first serious application of what later became DCGs.
Chris Mellish has a book on natural language processing in Prolog  
(there are also
Lisp and Pop editions) and Covington has a book on natural language  
processing in
Prolog.

When I was a student at Edinburgh in the 80s Prolog was used for some  
natural
language processing work there.  Prolog has been used to implement  
several
linguistic formalisms.

The basic problem is that developing toy systems isn't that hard, but  
developing
- full coverage grammars, or
- deep semantics
for *any* human language is still beyond the state of the art.
For example, one formal approach to semantics is Montague Semantics,  
which
is an omega-order modal temporal logic, and is computationally  
intractable.
(Which suggests that it probably isn't what people do; people are  
probably
much sloppier.)

Somewhere in between there is a big-enough-to-be-useful-but-small-
enough-to-be-done
version of the problem.  For example, people have developed stylised  
restrictions
of English good enough for expressing (some) software requirements but  
simple
enough to be processed.

We are not going to be building Commander Data any time this century  
(wild
prediction!), but there's a lot we can do, and Prolog is a good  
language for
some of it.

You might want to check what AT&T have been up to:  Fernando Pereira  
(one of the
early Names in Prolog) was there for a while.

--
Te Reo Ingarihi is a taonga of Te Iwi Pakeha,
ergo we should keep it pure, sans mélange, ruat caelum.






------------
For further info, please visit http://www.swi-prolog.org/

To unsubscribe, send a plaintext mail with "unsubscribe prolog <e-mail>"
in its body to majordomo@...